“Ah, yes—Lezare of Camellia? While you were living there was there a man—Masters, Charles Masters?”
“Stop, sir!” she interrupted. “What right have you to bring back that name into my life—what—?”
“Has it then left your life?” he asked, with a touch of fear in his voice. “Forgive me if I have given you pain, madam. My honor is my pledge that I mean no wrong. It is necessary—do you understand?—absolutely necessary for me to proceed.”
She was silent and seemed as one lost in a deep forest who seems to see a face in the darkness about.
“This man Masters was among those who went to Texas in her struggle for independence, was he not, madam? And after the battle of San Jacinto was reported among the killed? He loved a young lady of Charleston, one whom you may know—a young lady whose proud family were opposed to her union with one who had come to Charleston a penniless youth and had been the architect of his own fortunes—they preferred a wealthy young Bostonian, who brought letters to every family of influence in the state. You knew this, madam?”
His eyes asked pardon for this direct question and his voice was low with tenderness.
“Yes, yes, I knew this,” she responded, lacing and interlacing her slow, slender fingers. “What—what more?”
“You doubtless know, too, madam, that the report of his death was false and that he returned after peace was declared, to find his sweetheart had wedded his rival and gone to Boston to live. What you do not know”—here his voice took on a deep, full ring of joy—“is that he never, for one moment, never did and never has, doubted his sweetheart’s truth. To many men it is given to pass with unseeing eyes the holy worth of a woman’s love, but to Charles Masters it was given to know, when he had plighted his troth in the garden at Camellia, the sacredness of the gift that was his. Never once since then has his reverence for it or his belief in it failed.”
Colonel Masters was doing more than telling a harrowing story—he was reading his own fate in her eyes.
“Sir,” Mrs. Brooks started from her chair, “I will give you all I have in this world, I will give you all God gives me in Heaven to say those words again!”